Melbourne painter, Stieg Persson, has six related works here at the MCA. These are very large canvas works and they are, in his words, I guess, a portrait of a time and place, a portrait of a collective moment, portrait of society, and they're also a portrait of a particular class, which is sort of an aspirational middle-class.

So the paintings have a few key visual elements, all of them share these elements. There's a sort of underpainting that is white or cream and on over that, we have this sort of ornate gold graffiti-esque marking. And this is drawn from graffiti, the artist has seen in the laneways around his home area of Brighton in Melbourne.

Over top of the graffiti, we have these ornate rococo shapes drawn from Rococo design. They're black boards and on those black boards, we then have all this handwritten, or painted renditions of handwritten signs that Persson has collected from around the shopping centres around his home in Brighton in Melbourne. And this is, in a sense, a portrait of that place. So to you go back to it, the graffiti element, Persson talks about is being not quite that really efficacious, powerful, socially-charged graffiti, or that history that we associate with graffiti art. Instead, it's basically private school boys playing around with graffiti, as a certain style or some sort of fun activity in their spare time. So it's sort of a style of graffiti, but it doesn't have the punch of graffiti.

And then the signage that you get on these ornate boards, Persson talks about as the new aspirational middle-class Australian vernacular. So it's fancy wine, and it’s watermelon martinis, and it’s freshly brewed Chai, and it’s zucchini flowers, and it’s delicious raw vegan and gluten-free sweet treats. It’s Tucson lamb shoulders, it’s heirloom carrots, not just carrots, etc., etc., throughout all these paintings.

So he's talking to this projecting this desire for consumption and through identifying a class through its consumption. So in many ways, they are very beautiful, they're quite tough paintings. They're reflecting back at us something that, in many ways, much of an art-going public may well be implicated in. He certainly sees himself as being implicated and the signs of aspirational desire based in consumption that form a class identity. The other thing I think I should note about Persson's paintings is this idea of the rococo. The Rococo, is 17th-century French Rococo and then the 18th-century Rococo Revival across Europe, is this style that is, actually, a style about style so it's about excess, it's about ornate decoration. It's about expressing a certain class or certain status, through excess decoration, through over-the-top decoration. It's certainly non-utilitarian, it's the style associated with royal courtrooms, as Stieg said in his talk here at the MCA. It's also in a modern day parlance it's the style you'd see in Trump Towers. So, it's bad taste. It's something that's always associated with slightly bad taste.

And finally, a thing that I think is really interesting about these paintings and that, actually, I hadn't thought about until the artist noted it, is that the address of all the signage, is actually quite gendered. It's effectively an address to women. It's a suburb, in which the men are at work in corporate jobs, and the women are largely stay at home. So, it's an address to the sort of aspirations and desires, and also the spending power of the women of this particular suburb in Melbourne. Which he sees as sort of emblematic of a certain class desire, across Australia, generally.